Ian had hurt her.
A few hours here and, already, he’d made her tear up. Even though she’d let him off the hook, his guts still felt all ripped up that he was the cause of any more hurt. This is why men like him had no business taking on a woman. They were soft, and he was all claws and teeth and grizzly moods.
He dumped a second giant can of beef stew into the pot and stirred.
The woman had taken to nesting worse than he did right before hibernation. While he’d unpacked the pallets of food he’d brought with him from the bed of his pickup, she’d swept the floors and thrown out the dead flowers from the vase that decorated the kitchen table. He was pretty sure she’d even cleaned the outhouse. There was running water here, but just barely since, according to Elyse, it was fed by a natural spring that wasn’t a huge producer. There was enough for a quick, trickling shower, but not enough for toilet flushes, so the outhouse was going to be part of life now.
“Is your heat oil?” he asked. Lame. God, he didn’t know how to talk to women.
Elyse bent down with the dust pan and scooped a mound of dirt into it. “I couldn’t afford the three thousand a year to do oil, so I’m all wood burning. I mean we’re. We’re all wood burning.” She stood, cheeks flushed in the soft glow of the lanterns hung around the room.
“I’ll need to start cutting as soon as possible then. You only have enough chopped to last you the first couple of weeks of snow. And I think we’re going to have to butcher at least one of your cows.”
“What? Why?” she asked as she dumped the dustpan’s contents out the back door. “I need those to sell. That’s where my money comes from. I’m not totally off the grid or subsistence. I buy some of the things I need, and I only have fifteen head of cattle left, if no predators have run off with any of them.”
“I thought you said your brother was watching them.”
“Part of the time. More like checks on them, but Josiah’s no range rider. He has a life of his own and a little piece of land he’s managing close to the summer grazing range.”
“Hmm,” Ian said low in his chest. That wasn’t good. Predators were thick around here, thanks to all the wilderness around them. Galena was nothing like Anchorage. It was population five-hundred, and other than sitting on the bank of the Yukon River, it was surrounded by the Alaskan wilds. It was a wonder Elyse had any cattle left.
As if she could hear his thoughts, she said quietly, “When my uncle was alive and running this place, he had eighty cattle. It’s hard thinking about losing any more of his herd.”
“It’s not about the meat, Elyse.” Ian banged the extra stew off the spoon on the side of the pan and moved the boiling meal off the burner. “I looked at your hay, and if we cut it at peak time, when it will give the most nutrition to your animals—”
“Our animals.”
Ian sighed and leaned against the natural wood counter. “It won’t be enough to get a herd that big through the winter. Honestly, we need to butcher one or two and maybe even sell off a couple more. If you want to build the herd next warm season, then we need to figure out how to purchase more later, but we can’t feed what we have now. Not with that little hay.”
“I worked my ass off to plant that. Josiah helped, but most of that was me.”
Ian hated the disappointment on her face. He got it. Right now she was thinking about how hard she’d worked. She’d probably bled and sweated all over that field, and here he came, telling her the work wasn’t enough. “Next year will be different,” he said softly. “If you still want me around after this winter, we’ll get more hay planted, and I’ll buy you more cattle, okay? Between you and me and Josiah, we’ll get you where you want to be.”
Elyse’s hair was down and still damp from her shower, and as she picked at a little piece of masking tape on the counter, she’d let her tresses fall forward, hiding her face. He couldn’t stand not being able to see her eyes right now, so he reached forward and tucked a strand behind her ear, then lifted her chin with a hooked finger. “Okay?”
“You’re a good man,” she said so softly he wouldn’t have heard it without his heightened senses.
God, he wished that were true. If she knew her ex boyfriend’s blood was on his hands, though, Elyse wouldn’t be looking at him so gratefully right now. She was the good one. He was just here hoping some of her decency rubbed off on him.
Ian focused on pouring stew into the two wooden bowls Elyse pulled from the upper cabinets.
“Are you feeding an army?” she asked twitching her chin toward the vat of canned stew he’d heated up.
“Oh. I should tell you now. You’ll have to accept and get used to the fact that I eat a lot.”
“We’re going to eat all this in one sitting?”